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= Helen_Keller =
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Introduction
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Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 - June 1, 1968) was an American
author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer.
Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing
after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then
communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when
she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan.
Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After
an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller
attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first
deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts
degree.
Keller was also a prolific author, writing 14 books and hundreds of
speeches and essays on topics ranging from animals to Mahatma Gandhi.
Keller campaigned for those with disabilities and for women's
suffrage, labor rights, and world peace. In 1909, she joined the
Socialist Party of America (SPA). She was a founding member of the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Keller's autobiography, 'The Story of My Life' (1903), publicized her
education and life with Sullivan. It was adapted as a play by William
Gibson, later adapted as a film under the same title, 'The Miracle
Worker'. Her birthplace has been designated and preserved as a
National Historic Landmark. Since 1954, it has been operated as a
house museum, and sponsors an annual "Helen Keller Day".
Early childhood and illness
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Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter
of Arthur Henley Keller (1836-1896), and Catherine Everett (Adams)
Keller (1856-1921), known as "Kate". The Keller family lived on a
homestead, Ivy Green, which her paternal grandfather had built decades
earlier. She had four siblings: two full siblings, Mildred Campbell
(Keller) Tyson and Phillip Brooks Keller; and two older half-brothers
from her father's first marriage, James McDonald Keller and William
Simpson Keller.
Keller's father worked for many years as an editor of the Tuscumbia
'North Alabamian'. He had served as a captain in the Confederate Army.
The family was part of the slaveholding elite before the American
Civil War, but lost status later. Her mother was the daughter of
Charles W. Adams, a Confederate general. Keller's paternal lineage was
traced to Casper Keller, a native of Switzerland. One of Helen's Swiss
ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zürich. Keller
reflected on this fact in her first autobiography, asserting that
"there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no
slave who has not had a king among his".
At 19 months old, Keller contracted an unknown illness described by
doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain".
Contemporary doctors believe it may have been meningitis, caused by
the bacterium 'Neisseria meningitidis' (meningococcus), or possibly
'Haemophilus influenzae', which can cause the same symptoms but is
less likely because of its 97% juvenile mortality rate at that time.
She was able to recover from her illness, but was left permanently
blind and deaf, as she recalled in her autobiography, "at sea in a
dense fog". At that time, Keller was able to communicate somewhat with
Martha Washington, who was two years older and the daughter of the
family cook, and understood the girl's signs;by the age of seven,
Keller had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family, and
could distinguish people by the vibration of their footsteps.
In 1886, Keller's mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens'
'American Notes' of the successful education of Laura Bridgman, a deaf
and blind woman, dispatched the young Keller and her father to consult
physician J. Julian Chisholm, an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist
in Baltimore, for advice. Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander
Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell
advised them to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the
school where Bridgman had been educated. It was then located in South
Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked Anne Sullivan, a
20-year-old alumna of the school who was visually impaired, to become
Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a nearly 50-year-long
relationship Sullivan developed with Keller as her governess and later
her companion.
Sullivan arrived at Keller's house on March 5, 1887, a day Keller
would forever remember as "my soul's birthday". Sullivan immediately
began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand,
beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a
present. Keller initially struggled with lessons since she could not
comprehend that every object had a word identifying it. When Sullivan
was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so
frustrated she broke the mug. Keller remembered how she soon began
imitating Sullivan's hand gestures: "I did not know that I was
spelling a word or even that words existed. I was simply making my
fingers go in monkey-like imitation."
The next month, Keller made a breakthrough, when she realized that the
motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running
cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water".
Writing in her autobiography, 'The Story of My Life', Keller recalled
the moment:
Keller quickly demanded that Sullivan sign the names of all the other
familiar objects in her world.
Formal education
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In May 1888, Keller started attending the Perkins Institute for the
Blind. In 1893, Keller, along with Sullivan, attended William Wade
House and Finishing School. In 1894, Keller and Sullivan moved to New
York to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, and to learn
from Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1896,
they returned to Massachusetts, and Keller entered The Cambridge
School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to
Radcliffe College of Harvard University, where she lived in Briggs
Hall, South House. Her admirer, Mark Twain, had introduced her to
Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who, with his wife
Abbie, paid for her education. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller
graduated from Radcliffe as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, becoming the
first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She
maintained a correspondence with the Austrian pedagogue and
philosopher Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover
her literary talent.
Determined to communicate with others as conventionally as possible,
Keller learned to speak and spent much of her life giving speeches and
lectures on aspects of her life. She learned to "hear" people's speech
using the Tadoma method, which means using her fingers to feel the
lips and throat of the speaker. She became proficient at using
braille, and also used fingerspelling to communicate. Shortly before
World War I, with the assistance of the Zoellner Quartet, she
determined that by placing her fingertips on a resonant tabletop she
could experience music played close by.
Companions
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Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Keller long after she taught
her. Sullivan married John Macy in 1905, and her health started
failing around 1914. Polly Thomson (February 20, 1885 - March 21,
1960) was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from Scotland who
had no experience with deaf or blind people. She progressed to working
as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to
Keller.
Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Sullivan and Macy,
and used the house as a base for her efforts on behalf of the American
Foundation for the Blind. While in her 30s, Keller had a love affair
and became secretly engaged; she also defied her teacher and family by
attempting an elopement with the man she loved, Peter Fagan, who was
known as "the fingerspelling socialist", and was a young 'Boston
Herald' reporter sent to Keller's home to act as her private secretary
when Sullivan fell ill. At the time, her father had died and Sullivan
was recovering in Lake Placid and Puerto Rico. Keller had moved with
her mother in Montgomery, Alabama.
Sullivan died in 1936, with Keller holding her hand, after falling
into a coma as a result of coronary thrombosis. Keller and Thomson
moved to Connecticut. They traveled worldwide and raised funds for the
blind. Thomson had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully
recovered and died in 1960. Winnie Corbally, a nurse originally hired
to care for Thomson in 1957, stayed on after Thomson's death and was
Keller's companion for the rest of her life.
Career, writing and political activities
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On January 22, 1916, Keller and Sullivan traveled to the small town of
Menomonie in western Wisconsin to deliver a lecture at the Mabel
Tainter Memorial Building. Details of her talk were provided in the
weekly 'Dunn County News' on January 22, 1916:
Keller became a world-famous speaker and author. She was an advocate
for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. She traveled
to twenty-five different countries giving motivational speeches about
deaf people's conditions. She was a suffragist, pacifist, Christian
socialist, birth control supporter, and opponent of Woodrow Wilson. In
1915, she and George A. Kessler founded the Helen Keller International
(HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in
vision, health, and nutrition. In 1916, she sent money to the NAACP,
as she was ashamed of the Southern un-Christian treatment of "colored
people".
In 1920, Keller helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU). She traveled to over 40 countries with Sullivan, making
several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people.
Keller met every U.S. president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B.
Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander
Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin, and Mark Twain. Keller and Twain were
both considered political radicals allied with leftist politics.
Keller, who believed that the poor were "ground down by industrial
oppression", wanted children born into poor families to have the same
opportunities to succeed that she had enjoyed. She wrote, "I owed my
success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment. I have
learned that the power to rise is not within the reach of everyone."
In 1909, Keller became a member of the Socialist Party of America
(SPA); she actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working
class from 1909 to 1921. Many of her speeches and writings were about
women's right to vote and the effects of war; in addition, she
supported causes that opposed military intervention. She had speech
therapy to have her voice understood better by the public. When the
Rockefeller-owned press refused to print her articles, she protested
until her work was finally published.
Keller supported the SPA candidate Eugene V. Debs in each of his
campaigns for the presidency. Before reading 'Progress and Poverty' by
Henry George, she was already a socialist who believed that Georgism
was a good step in the right direction. She later wrote of finding "in
Henry George's philosophy a rare beauty and power of inspiration, and
a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature". Keller
stated that newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and
intelligence before she expressed her socialist views now called
attention to her disabilities. The editor of the 'Brooklyn Eagle'
wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her
development". Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met
him before he knew of her political views:
In 1912, Keller joined the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW,
known as the Wobblies), saying that parliamentary socialism was
"sinking in the political bog". She wrote for the IWW between 1916 and
1918. In 'Why I Became an IWW', Keller explained that her motivation
for activism came in part from her concern about blindness and other
disabilities:
The last sentence refers to prostitution and syphilis, the former a
"life of shame" that women used to support themselves, which
contributed to their contracting syphilis. Untreated, it was a leading
cause of blindness. In the same interview, Keller also cited the 1912
strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, for instigating
her support of socialism. As a result of her advocacy, she was placed
on the FBI's watchlist; the FBI wrote on July 1, 1953, that although
they have not "conducted an investigation with regard to Helen Adams
Keller", their files of Keller "reflect the following pertinent
information concerning this individual".
Keller supported eugenics, which had become popular with both new
understandings and misapprehensions of principles of biological
inheritance. In 1915, she wrote in favor of refusing life-saving
medical procedures to infants with severe mental impairments or
physical deformities, saying that their lives were not worthwhile and
they would likely become criminals. Keller also expressed concerns
about human overpopulation. From 1946 to 1957, Keller visited 35
countries. In 1948, she went to New Zealand and visited deaf schools
in Christchurch and Auckland. She met Deaf Society of Canterbury Life
Member Patty Still in Christchurch.
Works
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Keller wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles. One
of her earliest pieces of writing, at age 11, was 'The Frost King'
(1891). There were allegations that this story had been plagiarized
from 'The Frost Fairies' by Margaret Canby. An investigation into the
matter revealed that Keller may have experienced a case of
cryptomnesia, which was that she had Canby's story read to her but
forgot about it, while the memory remained in her subconscious.
At age 22, with help from Sullivan and Sullivan's husband John Macy,
Keller published her autobiography, 'The Story of My Life' (1903). It
recounts the story of her life up to age 21 and was written during her
time in college. In an article Keller wrote in 1907, she brought to
public attention the fact that many cases of childhood blindness could
be prevented by washing the eyes of every newborn baby with a
disinfectant solution. At the time, only a fraction of doctors and
midwives were doing this. Thanks to Keller's advocacy, this
commonsense public health measure was swiftly and widely adopted.
Keller wrote 'The World I Live In' in 1908, giving readers an insight
into how she felt about the world. 'Out of the Dark', a series of
essays on socialism, was published in 1913. When Keller was young,
Anne Sullivan introduced her to Phillips Brooks, who introduced her to
Christianity, Keller famously saying: "I always knew He was there, but
I didn't know His name!"
Her spiritual autobiography, 'My Religion', was published in 1927 and
then in 1994 extensively revised by Ray Silverman, and re-issued under
the title 'Light in My Darkness'. It advocates the teachings of
Emanuel Swedenborg, the Christian theologian and mystic who gave a
spiritual interpretation of the teachings of the Bible and who claimed
that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ had already taken place. Keller
described the core of her belief in these words:
* "The Frost King" (1891)
* 'The Story of My Life' (1903)
* 'Optimism: an essay' (1903) T. Y. Crowell and company
* 'My Key of Life: Optimism' (1904), Isbister
* 'The World I Live In' (1908)
* 'The miracle of life' (1909) Hodder and Stoughton
* 'The song of the stone wall' (1910) The Century co.
* 'Out of the Dark', a series of essays on socialism (1913)
* 'Uncle Sam Is Calling' (set to music by Pauline B. Story) (1917)
* 'My Religion' (1927; also called 'Light in My Darkness')
* 'Midstream: my later life' (1929) Doubleday, Doran & company
* 'We bereaved.'(1929) L. Fulenwider, Inc
* 'Peace at eventide' (1932) Methuen & co. ltd
* 'Helen Keller in Scotland: a personal record written by herself'
(1933) Methuen, 212pp
* 'Helen Keller's journal' (1938) M. Joseph, 296pp
* 'Let us have faith' (1940), Doubleday, & Doran & co., inc.
* 'Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy: a tribute by the foster-child of her
mind.' (1955), Doubleday (publisher)
* 'The open door' (1957), Doubleday, 140pp
* 'The faith of Helen Keller' (1967)
* 'Helen Keller: her socialist years, writings and speeches' (1967)
Archival material
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The Helen Keller Archives in New York are owned by the American
Foundation for the Blind. Archival material of Keller stored in New
York was lost when the Twin Towers were destroyed in the September 11
attacks.
Later life and death
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Keller had a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her
life at her home. On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson
awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United
States' two highest civilian honors. In 1965, she was elected to the
National Women's Hall of Fame at the New York World's Fair. Keller
devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American
Foundation for the Blind. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, at
her home, Arcan Ridge, located in Easton, Connecticut, at the age of
87. A service was held at the Washington National Cathedral in
Washington, D.C., and her body was cremated in Bridgeport,
Connecticut. Her ashes were buried at the Washington National
Cathedral next to her constant companions, Anne Sullivan and Polly
Thomson.
Portrayals
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Keller's life has been interpreted many times. She and her companion
Anne Sullivan appeared in a silent film, 'Deliverance' (1919), which
told her story in a melodramatic, allegorical style. She was also the
subject of the Academy Award-winning 1954 documentary 'Helen Keller in
Her Story', narrated by her friend and noted theatrical actress
Katharine Cornell; in 2023, the film was added to the National Film
Registry by the Library of Congress for being deemed "culturally,
historically, or aesthetically significant". She was also profiled in
'The Story of Helen Keller', part of the Famous Americans series
produced by Hearst Entertainment. In the 1950s, when she was
considered by many worldwide the greatest woman alive, Hearst reporter
Adela Rogers St. Johns told friends that she did not plan to include
Keller in the book she was writing about the most famous women of the
United States.
'The Miracle Worker' is a literature cycle of dramatic works
ultimately derived from her autobiography, 'The Story of My Life'. The
various dramas each describe the relationship between Keller and
Sullivan, depicting how the teacher led her from a state of almost
feral wildness into education, activism, and intellectual celebrity.
The common title of the cycle echoes Mark Twain's description of
Sullivan as a "miracle worker". Its first realization, starring Patty
McCormack as Keller and Teresa Wright as Sullivan, was the 1957
'Playhouse 90' teleplay of that title by William Gibson. When Keller
heard about it, she was enthusiastic, saying: "Never did I dream a
drama could be devised out of the story of my life." Within the
cultural context of the early civil rights movement, Gibson adapted it
for a Broadway production in 1959, which was praised by critics as a
contemporary classic, and an Oscar-winning feature film in 1962,
starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. It was remade for television in
1979, and then again in 2000.
An anime movie called 'The Story of Helen Keller: Angel of Love and
Light' was made in 1981. In 1984, Keller's life story was made into a
TV movie called 'The Miracle Continues'. This film, a semi-sequel to
'The Miracle Worker', recounts her college years and her early adult
life. None of the early movies hint at the social activism that would
become the hallmark of Keller's later life, although a Disney version
produced in 2000 states in the credits that she became an activist for
social equality. The Bollywood movie 'Black' (2005) was largely based
on Keller's story from her childhood to her graduation.
A documentary called 'Shining Soul: Helen Keller's Spiritual Life and
Legacy' was produced by the Swedenborg Foundation in 2005. The film
focuses on the role played by Emanuel Swedenborg's spiritual theology
in her life and how it inspired Keller's triumph over her triple
disabilities of blindness, deafness, and a severe speech impediment.
On March 6, 2008, the New England Historic Genealogical Society
announced that a staff member had discovered a rare 1888 photograph
showing Helen and Anne, which, although previously published, had
escaped widespread attention. Depicting Helen holding one of her many
dolls, it is believed to be the earliest surviving photograph of Anne
Sullivan Macy. Video footage showing Keller speaking also exists.
A biography of Keller was written by the German Jewish author H. J.
Kaeser. A 10 by painting titled 'The Advocate: Tribute to Helen
Keller' was created by three artists from Kerala, India, as a tribute
to Keller. The painting, which depicts the major events of Keller's
life and is one of the biggest paintings done based on her life, was
created in association with a non-profit organization Art d'Hope
Foundation, artists groups Palette People, and XakBoX Design & Art
Studio. This painting was created for a fundraising event to help
blind students in India, and was inaugurated by M. G. Rajamanikyam,
IAS (District Collector Ernakulam) on Helen Keller day (June 27,
2016). In 2020, the documentary essay 'Her Socialist Smile' by John
Gianvito evolves around Keller's first public talk in 1913 before a
general audience, when she started speaking out on behalf of
progressive causes.
Posthumous honors
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In 1999, Keller was listed fifth (at 30 percent) in Gallup's Most
Widely Admired People of the 20th century. That same year, Keller was
also named one of 'Time' magazine's 100 Most Important People of the
20th Century. In 2003, Alabama honored its native daughter on its
state quarter. The Alabama state quarter is the only circulating U.S.
coin to feature braille. The Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield,
Alabama, is dedicated to her. Streets are named after Keller in
Zurich, Switzerland; in Alabama and New York in the United States; in
Getafe, Spain; in Vienna, Austria; in Lod, Israel; in Lisbon,
Portugal; in Caen, France; and in São Paulo, Brazil. A preschool for
the deaf and hard of hearing in Mysore, India, was originally named
after Keller by its founder, K. K. Srinivasan. In 1973, Keller was
inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
A stamp was issued in 1980 (pictured) by the United States Postal
Service, depicting Keller and Sullivan, to mark the centennial of
Keller's birth. That year, her birth was also recognized by a
presidential proclamation from U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
Pennsylvania annually commemorates her June 27 birthday as Helen
Keller Day. On October 7, 2009, the State of Alabama donated a bronze
statue of Keller to the National Statuary Hall Collection, as a
replacement for its 1908 statue of education reformer Jabez Lamar
Monroe Curry. Keller was posthumously inducted into the Alabama
Women's Hall of Fame in 1971. She was one of twelve inaugural
inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8, 2015.
File:Alabama quarter, reverse side, 2003.jpg|Helen Keller as depicted
on the Alabama state quarter. The braille on the coin is English
Braille for "HELEN KELLER".
File:Helen Keller & Anne Sullivan issue of 1980.jpg|Helen Keller
(left) and Anne Sullivan
See also
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* Helen Keller International
* Helen Keller Services for the Blind
* Laura Bridgman
* List of peace activists
* Perkins School for the Blind
* Ragnhild Kåta
Further reading
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*
* Harrity, Richard and Martin, Ralph G. (1962). 'The Three Lives of
Helen Keller'.
*
*
* Lash, Joseph P. (1980). 'Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen
Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy'. New York: Delacorte Press. .
*
* Brooks, Van Wyck (1956). 'Helen Keller Sketch for a Portrait'.
External links
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[
http://www.perkinsarchives.org/helen-keller-and-anne-sullivan-links.html
Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Collections] at Perkins School for the
Blind
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